The man who lost $ 800 million Bitcoin on landfills wants to buy garbage

London
CNN
–

Buried deep in a long landfill, under the layers of long-standing garbage, there is a hard drive that holds almost $ 800 million in Bitcoin – or so Jams Howell believes, after you accidentally throw drive from 2013. Years.

And now, after years of fighting at the local government to take a hard drive, Howells came up with a new plan: to simply buy a landfill.

“In view of the purchase of the landfill. Funding insured,” he wrote Thursday in X, Section of Comments from Him, who Monday greatly reported in the UK, although he did not say who gave funding.

CNN reached Howells for a comment.

Hovells tried almost everything to access Docksway landfill in Newport, a city for 12 kilometers) northeast of large capital, Cardiff, including NEWPORT OF THE CITY COUNCIL OF NEWPORT OVER 70 MILLION 2021. year for a placement of a place.

His latest plan comes after the British Judge High Court stopped leaving, issuing a judgment in January who rejected his attempts to force him to allow him to be assigned to search the landfill.

Hovells accidentally kicked that key hard drive in August 2013. when he cleaned his house, thinking a blank disk that did not contain any data. He put it in a garbage bag that he left his partners then partners to bring to the garbage, before he realized, as the value of Bitcoin Rose, to put the wrong.

Since then, the value of Bitcoin Howell is said to the hard drive, jumped with about $ 9 million at almost $ 800 million, because the cryptocurrian prices have risen in recent years.

Each transaction bitcoin requires a private key, secret data contained in each individual Bitcoin wallet that mathematically proves that the transaction came from that wallet.

Heavills’ Hard Dion contains the “record” of that private key, Judge Andrew Keiser wrote in his judgment issued in January.

“The position is not in principle not different from what it would be if the private key record was written on a piece of paper placed in the landfill,” Keiser added.

Without knowing a private key, Hovells can’t access Bitcoin, he mined everything that year, when Kruptocurrency is a little known outside Tech world.

The City Council of Newport, which plans to close the landfill sometime in the financial year 2025/26, according to the local media, has not yet responded to CNN’s request. It said CNN 2021. It was not allowed to unveil the site.

“The Council told G. Hovell on several occasions that the excavation could be under our licensing and excavation itself would have a huge impact on the environment to the surrounding area”, at that time it was the environment at the time he said it was She had in the vicinity at the time.

“The costs of digging landfills, warehouses and treatment of waste could be encountered in a million pounds – without any guarantees to or find it or still in working condition.”